Staff: Mentor

You need to better define what you mean by IQ for this question. Could you please offer a quantitative definition of IQ for this thread to address? And I don't mean the simplistic definition of intellectual age divided by biological age, obviously.

Staff: Mentor

Interesting question. I haven't taken any IQ tests since high school, but I'm definitely smarter (IMO). I wonder if a google or wikipedia search would have data about raw IQ test scores versus age....?

Cognitive capabilities definitely increase as you grow up - I mean, an adult is usually more clever than a kid...
But if you are asking about the quantity of the IQ as defined by the tests - yea, tests are designed so that a kid with the same result as an adult gets more IQ points and there is some sort of correspondency between both. I suppose it looks like a curve when on a graph.

Your IQ can change according to your circumstances. For example, GIs in Vietnam returned with higher IQs than they left with. It is thought that the pressure to survive was the cause. Also, it depends upon what you mean by IQ.

However, at some point our bodies begin the inevitable slide towards death and our brain cells suffer the ravages of time.

Maybe they tested higher, but their IQ did not change. Was it within one standard deviation?

There is work being done for cognitive enhancement (the only thing on the market right now that shows an increase in IQ is Depakote - by ten points; less than a deviation) and with the Singularity nearing, there will be more work in this area.

The closer you are to achieving a college or graduate degree, the higher your intelligence level will be estimated. This means younger adults are more likely to achieve higher IQ scores since they're overrepresented in this population. It also means that, if you're between the ages of 18-30, your competition is stiffer. You'll have to be faster, more knowledgeable, and think more abstractly than someone who's older.

Imagine a returning-to-school forty-something who just got his Ph.D. His raw score will likely be higher than someone else in his age category and, therefore, his IQ score will be a few or more points higher.

Maybe they tested higher, but their IQ did not change. Was it within one standard deviation?

There is work being done for cognitive enhancement (the only thing on the market right now that shows an increase in IQ is Depakote - by ten points; less than a deviation) and with the Singularity nearing, there will be more work in this area.

Anticonvulsants, including Depakote, are neurotoxic. They LOWER IQ. All of the stuff you hear about Depakote and Lithium regrowing brain cells is absolutely, 100% bunk. Educate yourself before you make such fallacious statements. http://adhocinfinitum.livejournal.com

do you think your iq is higher when you're 25 or older compared to when you're in your late teens?

Without a doubt I'm far more intelligent at 27 than I was at 18. And I don't just mean that I know more, I mean that I have a better approach to solving problems. But the most dramatic (for me) change has been in my social skills. I'm able to sympathize and get along with other people in a way I never thought would be possible.

A lot of the things that we call IQ can be learned and taught. To a certain extent, I think it has as much to do with social expectations as it does with some abstract quality we might call "intelligence."

Some people I know with high IQ scores are incredibly dumb.

I do think that there is an aspect of intelligence that is innate. That's obvious if you meet a person who has a mental disability. But, beyond that, intelligence is contextual, based mostly on social and cultural ideals of what constitutes intelligence... and very hard to quantify objectively in a single number.

I don't know, at 18 I was pretty smart. I wouldn't say I'm smarter now (24) though now I know :
Methods to increase my learning rate
Structured critiques of problems for ease of solving
More articulate vocabulary
Greater depth of knowledge, thus leading to greater correlations between events, leading to an increase in learning and problem solving speeds
And so forth;

All of the things that make me feel "smarter" now I don't feel have to do with intelligence, but rather experience. What you learn makes learning easier, but your original capacity I believe remains the same.

I think the test would be to come up with some subject that is completely new and uncorrelated with anything anyone can already know. That way past experience and methodologies don't have an effect on the speed it takes you to learn it. Unfortunately I can't think of any topics that could actually do that.

IQ can rise and fall very slightly within one's lifetime. Typically the more one uses the brain for finding the solution to difficult problems, the higher the IQ is. (thus, quantity of brain usage has a positive correlation to quality of thoughts and IQ). For instance, a student planning on being an artist will most likely have a higher IQ in school than 10 years later at work. It is difficult to use the ages of 18 and 25 because 25 year olds can still be in school, which would probably lead to a higher IQ, or a 25 year old could have been a manager at McDonalds for years. Then again, some people don't get much out of school for whatever reasons. IQ, of course, is on an individual basis, so that is a difficult question to answer.